Review of The 39 Steps, Westport Country Playhouse
Westport Country Playhouse is back, under new Artistic Director Mark Shanahan, with a scheduled three-play season of comedies. The first, now playing through November 9, is the four-actor, multipart entertainment The 39 Steps, a slapstick rendering of a spy novel by John Buchan that reached the big screen in 1939, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. From that date, you can tell that a plot based on British secrets being leaked to crafty Germans was certainly timely. Nowadays, the espionage hijinks play out as a comically nostalgic recall of music hall comedy, chases on a train, and the clash of London panache with rural Scots oddity, among other things.
Richard Hannay (Joe Delafield) in The 39 Steps at Westport Country Playhouse; photo by Carol Rosegg
As our often flappable and put-upon hero, Richard Hannay, Joe Delafield looks like he belongs in a film from the Thirties or Forties: lean, “with piercing blue-eyes,” and a rakish moustache, Hannay, bored in his London flat, seeks excitement by going to the theater. There an act called Mr. Memory (Evan Zes) is interrupted by a gunshot and soon Hannay is swept up into a spy plot by Annabella Schmidt (Sharone Sayegh), whose hilarious accent and truly comic mannerisms seem to captivate our hero; that is, until she suddenly turns up dead.
Now if you’re thinking that doesn’t sound exactly hilarious, how wrong you are. You have to see the trench-coated hitmen (Zes and Seth Andrew Bridges) waiting by a streetlamp that they carry dutifully onstage each time Hannay or Schmidt looks out the window, and Annabella’s death throes have to be seen to be believed.
Richard Hannay (Joe Delafield), Annabella Schmidt (Sharone Sayegh) in The 39 Steps at Westport Country Playhouse; photo by Carol Rosegg
A major asset of this production is the casting: Delafield looks his part, certainly, and Sayegh conveys well the three different women that Hanny encounters and takes a more than casual interest in, especially plucky Pamela, a blonde who doesn’t buy his preposterous story, with good reason. Their “romantic interludes”—with lighting and sound that arrive on cue like a DeMille close-up—are almost as fun as what happens when two people handcuffed to each other have to navigate varied terrain, or remove stockings.
Richard Hannay (Joe Delafield) with Clown 2 (Evan Zes) and Clown 1 (Seth Andrew Bridges) in The 39 Steps at Westport Country Playhouse; photo by Carol Rosegg
Then there are the Clowns, Zes and Bridges. Zes, as Professor Jordan’s wife, looks like Groucho Marx in drag, and his extended effort to introduce Hannay, mistaken as a visiting candidate, at a political rally, is the kind of comedy that really must be done live to come off. We become the baffled rally crowd trying to discern if the speaker is saying anything intelligible at all. It’s a tour de force of silliness. And Bridges, as Professor Jordan, whom Hanny seeks out for help, creates a bizarre character who gets more and more unhinged. The return to the Mr. Memory act brings us full circle with the knowledge of the mysterious MacGuffin called “the 39 Steps” hanging in the balance.
Director Mark Shanahan handles all this with obvious love of the source material—not only Barlow’s adaptation but also the Hitchcock film universe that hovers as background, giving us jokes that play off a creepy but familiar world, as when a silhouette of the Bates Motel indicates Hannay’s and Pamela’s destination. Or when a tableaux of WWI fighter planes suddenly appears when Hannay goes on the run.
Richard Hannay (Joe Delafield) in The 39 Steps at Westport Country Playhouse; photo by Carol Rosegg
Westport’s The 39 Steps is inspired silliness handled with a great feel for the very visual humor of this enthusiastically charged romp. Is there anything of substance in the story? As a hero, Hannay is typical of Hitchcock who likes his protagonists to be Everymen without any particular agenda. When Hannay is forced to improvise a stump speech in Scotland, he comes up with the kind of “a better world for everyone” rhetoric that sounds good without having any bite. Knowing nothing about the community he is addressing, he’s rather limited in what he can say, but it does somewhat fall on our ears as the sort of speech that, in 1939, would be rather weak and anodyne. But in the play there are real enemies and lives are really at stake. Just like in real life.
The cast of The 39 Steps at Westport Country Playhouse; photo by Carol Rosegg
The 39 Steps
Adapted by Patrick Barlow
From the Novel by John Buchan
From the Movie by Alfred Hitchcock
And an Original Concept by Simon Corble and Nobby Dimon
Directed by Mark Shanahan
Scenic Designer: James J. Fenton; Costume Designer: Jeni Schaefer; Lighting Designer: J. Dominic Chacon; Sound Designer: Ryan Rumery; Movement Coordinator: Steve Pacek; Production Stage Manager: Megan Smith; Assistant Stage Manager: Amadi Cary; Production Assistant: Chris Conte
Cast: Seth Andrews Bridges, Joe Delafield, Sharone Sayegh, Evan Zes
Westport Country Playhouse
October 22-November 9, 2024